London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: November 2014

music-work-emotion-mental health: a nexus

So let’s start with some of the things that are obvious to anyone who works in music but possibly not to others.

If you’re a musician, then playing / singing music is your job. Or, for a lot of us, your line of self-employment – important because the self-employed don’t get sick leave. So once you’re contracted in, you’re going to want to do something – pulling out not only loses you that job but might lose you any future opportunity of working for that client (yes, really. Maybe not thought through quite that explicitly, but really). If you can keep going an illness, whether it’s a cold, a bad back or a particularly bad flare-up of your clinical anxiety, then you will. That’s what it’s like in an overcrowded freelance market – the potential financial consequences of doing otherwise are too severe.

Slightly more unexpected: If you’re a classical musician, or a hired hand, or indeed a band member who’s not your band’s main writer, then your task is not to be a self-expressive artist. If you’re playing second-desk viola in a Mozart symphony, the only feelings you’re going to be creating are those of Mozart when writing it (perhaps) or the conductor when considering their interpretation (also perhaps – both might in fact just be the emotions the relevant people chose to try and convey and they might not at all have been their own at the time. If you’re playing someone else’s song, then you have to fit with it, or at least with the arrangement you may or may not have been involved in thrashing out. And once a track is well-known, then you have to reproduce it in essentials, including mood, each time you perform it. You’re unlikely to feel the same way performing a given set halfway through a six-month tour as you did playing most of those songs ungigged in the recording studio. But you can’t rehash them to suit your emotions at the time because that won’t fit with the expectations of either your fellow performers or your audiences and, oh look, there went your commercial (and quite possibly critical) viability.

So from the above, it would appear that the craft of music is in part involved in placing immediate emotion on one side and performing music as the music is, rather than you are – a sort of sublimated acting. Arguably, a (professional) violinist who is in love, depressed, elated by his football team’s victory, etc., should not play the same piece any differently under those different circumstances, any more than an accountant should analyse the same columns of figures differently when elated, depressed, in love.

But, there may well be a difference to the rate and accuracy of the accountant’s work if they are emotionally or mentally disordered; their teamwork and interlocking with colleagues working on different areas may also benefit or suffer. And music is similar except that (barring in some senses very high-budget recordings) it is carried out in a very immediate and real-time fashion. Ensemble music-making is also a closeness of teamwork rarely found in desk jobs. The result is that someone who is depressed (or just tired, or had an unexpectedly difficult journey to the rehearsal) may take more plays through a passage to nail it than they usually would. If they don’t get the extra plays due to lack of rehearsal time or a set schedule and organisation that prevents extending practice time for the benefit of one individual, then they will be more likely to have not yet reached mastery of the section by the performance, which is when it matters. In a small band, they may also be socially saturnine, prickly or unpredictable, which distracts their bandmates’ attention and makes it more difficult to follow and interact with their musical intentions – quite regardless of whether anyone gets upset by their behaviour.

Even if you take a really quite severely craftspersonlike view of the business of performing music – and when expecting somebody to pay I generally do – it must be acknowledged that extremes of emotion and mental health problems affect, not the ‘expressive style’ of one’s music-making, but rather the dexterity and technique of it; in a not dissimilar way to physical ailments or injuries. In a more distinctive way, they also have the potential to impair ensemble cohesion.

Thus: music does not have to reflect the emotional states of its players / singers. But those emotional states may significantly impact the quality of the music produced.

On the road again

Later this morning I’m off to Warminster. Apparently that’s somewhere near Bath; I’ve only really checked how to get there by train. The name’s appropriate to what I’m doing there though, which is playing for a concert in the minster entitled ‘For the Fallen’. Viola of course, being an orchestral dep job (see previous comments on orchestral work across the two instruments). Actually there was another advert for a paid dep viola today, which if it hadn’t clashed I would have gone for. Now if only these openings would spread themselves out so I can try and bag them all, my income / expenses figures might look rather healthier …

The programme’s a somewhat interesting one. It’s a choral concert, but with Barber’s Adagio slung in to give the singers (and winds, apparently!) a break. The singers will certainly need it – the choral works are Elgar’s Spirit of England, an oratorio-type setting of three poems that’s a good half an hour long, and contemporary composer Paul Carr’s Requiem for an Angel, which despite the odd title is a full-blown requiem setting. Well, as full-blown as many of the well-known nineteenth-century settings – it misses out the Dies Irae as is often done since Fauré and adds in a couple of extra devotional texts. But it’s very much a full-scale art music requiem. I suppose people outside a very much devotional career-path still writing requiems isn’t that surprising – there’s the Rutter and Lloyd Webber ones, and a sort of precedent in the Jenkins Mass for Peace. But to approach it as (in some ways) thoroughly traditionally as this is perhaps interesting.

The Elgar strikes me more, though, from a very small amount of research. It seems to have originated with a suggestion, during the first world war, that Elgar write a requiem for the fallen; while the result is not that, it is a work directed at war dead and war suffering – the second movement is entitled ‘For Women’ and the text works on the assumption (pretty much entirely valid in WWI) that women remained at home (though by no means inactive or uncontributive to the war effort) while men were sent off to fight. However, two of its three movements were premiered in 1916 and the full work in 1917. So the interesting thing is that this is a work written in the middle of the war and before there was any good evidence Britain, France et al would be victorious. Perhaps for this reason, I find it relatively wonderfully free of the self-congratulatory and militaristic elements which so often taint our looking back at either world war – and in the case of the first I think it should be seriously questioned whether ‘our side’ can be seen as defending their country, democracy, freedom or progress any more than the other. But that should not lessen our sense of horror at the sheer brute suffering of those or any other wars.

No silver platters please

A few months back, early in the trial pro music phase, I expressed initial interest in a job playing violin for the army (yes, really. I was as surprised as you). I then discovered you had to apply for the army in general first then get yourself put on the musician track (which I’m sure is just admin but still seems scary – what if they redraft me to RPG fodder because of a(nother) security crisis?), and go through basic military training, and generally got cold feet and didn’t proceed.

Since then I’ve had a chaser email to say I haven’t applied to join the army, been invited to an open day at (one of) the relevant orchestra(s) (not sure if there’s more than one to be honest) and most recently been contacted personally by the principal 2nd violin to ask if I would like to visit, meet them, see what they do in practice. It all feels a bit like I’m being headhunted by the armed forces, which if you ask me is a rather disturbing image.

It comes down a lot to the eventual theme of my previous post: doing music per se or wanting to be happy doing music? This option is possibly within my musical grasp (certainly more so than a full-time job with a London/BBC professional orchestra) but, unlike pretty much anything else in that category, would offer dependable pay, no need to hunt out freelance jobs case-by-case, freedom from insecurity, stress and tax returns. But, it involves being technically a soldier and very much living or at least working full-time in a military environment. Which, as a default pacifist (ie, violence always worse than no violence, but there are situations where armed intervention can be expected to reduce the total sum of violence and suffering, and there is a moral case for taking those opportunities) and an almost anti-nationalist – certainly more of a globalist than a patriot – seems a problem rather than a goal.

I had made up my mind to let the possibility drop completely. I’m thinking again because my desk job seems particularly a pain in the backside lately, and I’m looking at usual pay rates and wondering if it’s plausible for me to expect to get a properly paid gig every week – which is pretty much what I’d need to make the current arrangement sustainable. But it’s not that I’ve changed my mind; I’ve just unmade it down.

Bottom lines

So, where were we before the severest part of that interruption?

On Sunday afternoon, I did something I generally don’t do in principle: I played a gig for free.

I accept open mics obviously don’t pay, that’s part of the nature of them being open to anyone (including, it would have to be admitted, some spectacularly bad performances!) and equal, friendly experimentation spaces.

But in general, I want to make money out of music. Because if I can’t, I’ll need to go back to full-time employment, ditch a lot of the music I’m doing at present, try and find a desk job I can stand more than the current one … it’s not the most appealing prospect to be honest.

And there’s two ways of going on from there. One is the moral argument that musicians perform a service, you’re actually paying for all the practice time, the learning of the skills, the investment in hardware, the self-promotional activity, etc., you wouldn’t expect a pub to give out free booze for the exposure … all of these arguments can be seen rehearsed with considerable ire on several Facebook musician-finder groups every week. And I agree with them, I’m just not going to repeat them in detail here as they show up so often.

The alternative viewpoint is simply that if I want in general to get income from music, then I will have to not make music available for free (at least not in the live performance form that I want to charge for it), and encourage others to not do so either. Otherwise I will get priced out of a market where too many sellers are willing to sell for nothing (which is already a real risk, especially in sub-sectors like originals bands).

So, coming back to the start, why did I break that rule on Sunday?

Well, partly I had nothing particular better to do with an hour on that Sunday afternoon, and it took very little effort for me to throw a set together (I think I did about an hour’s practice, biked to and from the pub with my fiddle on my back, and played and sang by myself – all very good folky grassroots stuff). And the organisers had lost a couple of acts to illness, and I’m really excessively vulnerable to the white-knight appeal of helping a young woman out of an awkward situation. (Sickening, isn’t it?)

But finally, I am in a privileged position among musicians. In terms of sheer saleable skills, music isn’t the only thing I’ve got. If it was completely impossible to make any money from music, I would still be able to the editing/writing/proofreading sphere, and probably some purchasing and admin stuff too. The reason for wanting to earn from music is chiefly that other options are proving psychologically ill-fitting, not that they are practically or financially non-existent.

And in that case, there’s no point me actually doing music – paid or not – if I don’t enjoy it, or at least if I wouldn’t rather play than not. And every so often, I just need to touch base with that fact when I’ve got my eye too firmly on the next recording or technical slog practice or new song to learn, or I’ve been so exhaustingly searching for work that I haven’t had time or energy left to actually play outside of rehearsals for days. Remind myself that my enjoyment is part of the picture.

Why I felt about 39 earlier in the week

The young boy’s line was I’ll show you;
The twenties was watch me burn this fire;
The thirties was Jesus God, where did I go wrong?
The forties was good Lord, how much longer?- Kelly Joe Phelps, ‘Flash Cards’

It’s eased off somewhat since then. But it’s somewhere I may always end up returning to, and usually with very little apparent say in my getting into or out of it. Hence a thin week for blog posts.

Generation @

Due to my last change of address, I had to persuade my GP’s surgery that, contrary to default practice, they should keep me on despite my having moved out of their practice area. This was fairly evidently the right choice given the rest of my life hasn’t moved geographically, and based on Oxford rental experience to date I will be moving, probably to another surgery’s area, in about another 18 months whether I like it or not. Besides, it’s not like I require home visits and I’m still only 15 minutes’ bike from the surgery, but my medical problems are somewhat complicated and I’m unwilling to just take them to an unknown doctor who may or may not (again, judging by experience to date) turn out to be any good at handling them, when my current one is actually good.

This morning, I was engaged in registering for PPL, so as a performer I get royalties if anyone actually officially (as opposed to cash-in-hand from the group) buys / plays in public / etc. a recording I played on. In order to do so, I had to provide proof of address. How am I supposed to do that? I’m not going to keep updating my aged provisional driving licence every time I move (that’s £30 every year or two if I remember rightly!), I rent in a houseshare where I’m not responsible for paying any of the utilities (and if I was I’d go for online billing as you almost always get a discount and it’s more eco), and the council tax bills haven’t caught up with me moving in yet. In the end I used a letter thanking me for registering to vote here, but because the PPL registration system is automated and online up to the point of submitting everything over the web, I don’t know if they’ll accept it or not.

Geographical location – sometimes exact location, not just area – remains of key, perhaps primary, importance to a lot of administrative officialdom. Where you live is not just a contact detail to send you hard copies of particularly important documents; it is part of who you are, shaping your rights, privileges, responsibilities and liabilities.

Unfortunately, this has failed to catch up with modern-day Britain for the under-40s. As home ownership becomes the privilege of an ever-shrinking proportion of the population – a proportion largely shrinking upwards in age, and an increasingly overstretched rental market (in the crowded but hiring south east of England anyway) becomes more and more volatile, frequent changes of address are a fairly unavoidable reality for many people, even those in white-collar graduate jobs, who are not living with a partner. We now frequently move house more often than we change jobs, change towns or enter into a different marital status. The push to electronic documentation means there are practical (storage space? physical weight to transport between homes?) and often financial advantages to minimising the amount of literal paperwork you receive. But many of the most important institutions in your life have to be separately informed of a move between houses, and may treat it as of capital importance because you cross one of the boundaries of their own particular system, even though as far as you are concerned most of your life is stable except you eat and sleep a couple of miles further north, and you would much rather keep as much continuity as possible in everything else given the exigencies of the housing market have already forced you to move to a different house and probably a different set of housemates. (What this must be like for people living close to country borders I cannot imagine – perhaps the difference between very northern England and very southern Scotland regains a practical importance despite its physical non-existence because moving across it would be so much hassle.)

How do we manage a ‘portable’ identity – one that can be carried across from place to place in a relatively smooth fashion, rather than having to be rebuilt brick-by-brick at each relocation? It shouldn’t be an insoluble problem for a web-literate society. In the meantime, it is true that all of us young (in a broad sense) singles (in an equally broad sense) are de facto – not homeless, but certainly insecurely housed; but there’s no need for the system to rub it in.

One step, two steps …

Sometimes you’re not sure which number is which direction.

Monday: auditions for guitarists for The Filthy Spectacula. In the words of a band about as different as you can be with most of the same instrumentation, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Well, not really. And it certainly wasn’t either of those guys sadly. Though we did finally look at a song by me and think of a good one to do a messed-up cover of. (No, of course I’m not telling you what yet.)

Also Monday: further obstacle to string quartet rehearsals. But at least we seem to have two dates firmly in the diary and the 20 December wedding gig is set in stone.

Today: Celtic/Americana-function band ‘on indefinite hold’, basically broken up. On the one hand, Wednesday evenings back and no more return train fares to Swindon. On the other, another potential route to fairly well-paid gigs out the window.

Momentum

Every so often, there’s a lull in activity as a freelancer, or indeed as any musician or band. And there’s often not much you can do about it, except cast the net a bit wider as you look for wanted ads. These are the points when, perforce, you take stock a bit and catch up on what it would be nice to do when you’re not chasing round in circles.

Chasing round in circles is not particularly going away. I write this at five past seven in the morning, sitting on the bus from Oxford to London in order to spend the day in a voice recording studio with my desk job (in the control room not the live room I hasten to add). Then I’m going to go on to a Filthy Spectacula practice / guitarist auditioning session, stay overnight on our bassist’s (sorry, the Dreadful Helmsman‘s) boat and go back for another day’s studio supervision … then back to Oxford for some sleep and a String Project practice (sadly not in that order) … then probably back into London (maybe not) for a string quartet rehearsal. That takes me up to about lunchtime on Wednesday.

However, there’s nothing particularly new on the horizon; nothing getting booked in at the moment. So I’m going to be doing some new demo recordings with better audio quality (maybe even – whisper it – better playing from yours truly) and some revised repertoire choices, looking at the promo situation again, contacting some more potential hirers. All of which should mean my web presence is a bit more dynamic and interesting than maybe it’s been in the last little while.

In the meantime, here‘s a video of the String Project last Friday, playing a jazz arrangement of mine. Solos (in order of appearance): Ben Mowat (vln), me (vln), Wulf Forrester-Barker (bass).

A risky business

Last night I had a very good gig with The String Project (and Got my Jo-Mo working and Jim Telford, and the Local Supercluster – but I wasn’t part of those elements). I say very good because the music went well, the organisation held together, the audience were appreciative and there were no serious technical, logistical or musical balls-ups. And when (sadly it’s not always) a String Project / Local Supercluster event comes together like that, it really is something out of the ordinary. But it certainly helped that we got enough cash on the door to pay for the room hire and most of the other expenses, so we didn’t end up at a loss out of it I don’t think.

The sort of people that write and speak about change in the economics of the music industry tend to be the sort of people that are enthusiastic about the new, particularly the technological new. And so they often emphasise the advantages of artists being able to communicate and interact directly with their audiences / followers/ fans / parasocial friends (depending how far you take the social media / apparent personal contact aspect of post-Facebook marketing, Katy Perry) without going through big corporate mediators who formerly controlled recording, print, marketing, broadcasting and even live performance spaces. And fair enough, it is nice to be able to make recordings and publish or sell them directly, and keep the take, to set up your own website and mailing list and communicate to people without getting a marketing budget and buying space from a magazine, to have control and to be able to do things without getting the backing of corporate managers who may have very different priorities and perceptions of value from both you, the musician, and the audience(s). And it’s certainly nice in principle to not have to pay their profit margin out of your work.

But, with taking over the vast majority of control and, in several areas, profit (where charging for music is still working or people have found ways of monetising it indirectly) comes taking over the vast majority of the risk as well. Sure, you can record to pro standard without a record label – but you still need studio time, a pro engineer paid by the day, duplication services if you want hard-copy, promotional activity of one sort or another. Under the ‘old system’, this was probably more expensive but was also paid for by a record label, paid back out of the profits when things sold. And you’d get an advance if you were trusted by the label to deliver financially. Now, you can do it yourself, do what you want, costs have come down a lot it’s true, but the artists pays them upfront and hopes to get enough sales / paid downloads / streams / live bookings out of it to make it back with interest. At the least you’re kind of lending the relatively newly liberalised music market the money and hoping to profit on the investment, in a very volatile environment.

Same for booking your own gigs – no management control, no being put on a bill with totally unsuitable other acts, no daft restrictions or requirements to put x number of people on the guest list just to demonstrate there are people coming because of you, no cuts going to organisers, promoters and full-time marketeers. But, you’ve paid for the room (maybe the PA as well) in advance, and almost certainly for the promotion (probably worked on it quite a lot as well) – and if you don’t make it back in ticket sales, tough luck. (If you’ve rented out the room, the odds of you getting a look in at the bar tab are minimal – although healthy bar takings can be key to getting return invitations from venues that pay their acts.) Again, financial risk sits with the artist.

Gigs paid by ticket sale split are increasingly common, and the organisers tend to be quite self-righteous about them because they do offer financial reward – they’re not simply unpaid or pay-to-play, and at least the musicians don’t have to buy a wodge of tickets and be out of pocket unless they sell them. But of course the musicians get more or less according to their ability, not chiefly to perform well, but to pull in an audience. The marketing efforts of organisers are very frequently somewhat perfunctory – and if you’ve just halved your financial risk by splitting it with the performers, that seems like sensible business.

So if you wonder why barely-semi-pro musicians seem desperately up themselves, only contacting you when they have a gig to promote and that seems to be every other week, then using all contact channels from Facebook events to texts and forcing flyers into your hands to convince that this gig is unique and special and you’ll forever regret not going – it’s because our prospects of continuing to be able to afford a celebratory pint afterwards depend on our success in the very un-English activity of blowing our own trumpets. Really loudly.

Struggles

I got paid yesterday (as it turns out, I didn’t see it on my online bank statement till today) for an orchestral dep gig. Which is good.

The thing is, the gig was over three months ago, and even with an unusually long invoice payment period (30 working days) payment was about two months overdue. I had written emails, attempted to phone, and eventually left an answerphone message (my second) saying I would take action to recover the money if it didn’t appear. I don’t think it’s coincidence that the transfer finally showed up shortly after that. Before I found I’d been paid, I’d actually rung the Citizens’ Advice Bureau about small claims court proceedings, looked up the processes and fees on the government web hub, and decided I would explicitly threaten that in a hardcopy letter as the next step.

But why make it that hard? For that matter, if you’re hoping to get away without paying up to some of your musicians, why have a very elaborate contractual and payment papertrail that would make it impossible to make out you didn’t owe the money if some awkward sod did actually stick it all the way to court (and I would have if it came to it, since the amount I was owed was about 5 times the court fee). Isn’t everyone’s life too short for that kind of pratting around?

What I suppose this does demonstrate is life isn’t too short to kick up a fuss for your rights as a contractor or freelance, even over perhaps relatively insignificant things. And it suggests to me I should stick to insisting on work that turns a bit of a profit, declining voluntary / ‘for charity’ / expenses-only / ‘exposure / experience’ jobs. If only there were more of them though …